ShyBry

I beat the NES version a few years back without any white mages. The trick there without grinding too much was that the RUSE/INVS/INV2 spells increase evasion, and stack. RUSE/INVS can be cast by knights, and INV2 can be cast by using the white shirt. So, spend the first few turns casting RUSE with one character and having another wave the white shirt around like a madman, and eventually non-critical-hit physical attacks will be guaranteed to miss. This gave me enough of a break that I was able to keep up with healing, apply damage buffs before Chaos' first full heal, and do enough damage before his second full heal to get it done.

Although the above might just be a bug fixed in the PSP version. Plus I had a red mage with some healing magic (but no group healing other than the heal helm/staff IIRC). Also in NES version Chaos only has 2k HP so there's a lot less to endure. So maybe this wouldn't apply in your scenario.

What I do is paste the premium download links into VLC (saving the download step via it's "open location from clipboard" feature), then alter the playback speed from the VLC menus. A good way to catch up on missed podcasts. I find I can usually set the playback speed to 1.1x if I have a podcast on in the background, or up to 1.3x-1.4x if I'm focusing on the podcast specifically, without it being too hard to keep up with.

Increased playback speed of gameplay usually doesn't look too great, though occasionally it makes a game that's too sluggish look more entertaining to watch/play than it actually is.

Large explosives

TRT-82H-93G

A level with lots of bombs and stuff blowing up, and a cliffhanger finish.

Steal My Moonshine - same basic premise as Steal My Sunshine, except with Super Mario Odyssey, and additional special gumball colors. One such gumball would force the person who earned it to take a shot of either something alcoholic, or (because someone might be past their limit, no matter what that limit is, no shaming) some of that vile ranch dressing soda or something like that. Another special gumball would force the next life of the person who earned it to be played with a GameCube controller via the Smash Bros. GameCube-to-USB adapter (which totally works with Odyssey), for some of that old-timey Steal My Sunshine feeling.

@ep_driver: No PC required. If you don't have one already you'll need an SD card that fits in your Nt mini and a way to read/write the card from your Mac. I'm not sure what maximum capacity SD card the NT mini supports; you might want to look this up before buying anything (and if you can't find any information, I'd assume 64GB would be too big and get something smaller). There are plenty of USB SD card readers that would work fine with a Mac and I'd assume they all do these days, to be honest.

Once you've extracted the jailbroken firmware onto the SD card and are running it, it looks like to actually dump the save you'll need to follow some instructions which might be a bit tricky if you're not tech-savvy... The trickiest of which is you'll need to know the NES mapper number for the game. The firmware's README.txt links to a large document listing mapper numbers for many games, so if you're OK with looking up a number in a document per game you should be fine.

Beware that the jailbroken firmware almost definitely voids your Nt mini's warranty, so don't try any of this if that's important to you. If you're still interested I'd recommend finding the firmware and reading the README.txt; if the installation and dumping instructions don't make any sense, maybe don't do it yourself?

Yes, you can use kevtris' jailbroken firmware for the Analogue Nt mini to dump saves off of NES carts. Might not support every game, but the README.txt claims "There's a lot of mappers supported" so you're probably good? Not sure if it's cool to link to from here, but once you've found the firmware it sounds as simple as extracting the contents of a zip file to an SD card.

The Retrode supports dumping SNES and Genesis/Megadrive saves (and Gameboy, GBC, GBA, N64 and possibly other system saves with the right firmware and physical cartridge adapters - EDIT does not support dumping GBA saves, I misremembered). No NES support for the Retrode; last I checked someone was working on it but progress stalled.

Super Mario Bros.

1-1 is the best tutorial. The first goomba, mushroom, and pipe were all positioned in order to make it likely that you'd gain some understanding of the game's basic mechanics just by playing. No mountains of text, no hand holding, just play.

Obviously games have gotten complicated enough that it's difficult/impossible to take this approach these days. But I still enjoy taking a stroll through 1-1 every now and then; I can't say I enjoy many other tutorials.

As mentioned, BOTW's Great Plateau is a recent fun tutorial.

I may have a problem. Still play games like I did when I would get 2-3 new ones per year, yet I have access to more unplayed games than I think I could possibly play in several lifetimes. Some of my poorest uses of time follow.

The bestiary in Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin shows question marks for each possible random drop until it has dropped. I filled this out. Haven't played more than a few minutes of Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia and I think it was due to being tired of the series after my self-imposed tedious bullshit.

I cooked all the recipes in Super Paper Mario, to fill out the in-game recipe list. I'm not really sure why? This was a terrible use of time.

I completed all the challenges in Super Smash Bros. Brawl without using any golden hammers. As part of which I built a CD-factory level to grind for CD and sticker drops.

I completed all the challenges in Super Smash Bros. for 3DS without using any golden hammers. The random drop rate for hats may be the most oppressive I've ever seen.

Might be in partial remission. I started trying to complete all the challenges in Super Smash Bros for WII U and then just stopped at some point. Also, I've decided that I'm not going to get all the Korok seeds in Breath of the WIld... I've gotten more than 50% without using a guide or paying for the Korok mask, and I'm going to call that good enough. Will likely pay for the DLC once the second pack is available, and I hope I can resist the urge to then use the Korok mask to finish it off.

Lucky for me I never really got into system-level trophies/achievements, and never had any interest in MMOs.

@dukeofthebump:

The trouble with the Sonic 3 platform is that before the "difficult" one, there are one or two easier ones that can be passed with well-timed rhythmic jumps. So there's no reason to learn that this one type of platform is influenced by pressing up and down, and, well, I got stuck there too. Would have been okay if there was a signpost or something with up/down arrows, or a cutscene with Knuckles going up and down without jumping, or maybe a modern-style d-pad overlay the first time you stand on one of those platforms, but games didn't tutorialize like that very much back then...

For sure! I played through one of the Lego games with a friend, and there were so many "this shouldn't be so difficult" moments with head-slap-worthy solutions... Still fun though.

In Link's Awakening I was stuck on the quest to retrieve the golden leaves for Richard for far too long. Was able to get four of the five leaves from the castle without trouble, but couldn't get past the door to the room with the fifth. I tried looking for switches under the nearby jars, without luck. Bombing the door didn't open it, though I didn't expect it to, as it wasn't cracked. There were no enemies to kill that might trigger the door to open, so I backtracked and killed every enemy in the castle (except the one in the room I couldn't get to) but of course that didn't do anything. I tried pressing on walls but didn't find any false ones. Bombing every wall in the castle didn't work either - had a lot of free time back then! I left the castle and talked to every character in the game I had found up to that point, but nobody provided any clues. At some point I returned to Richard's Villa and sat there, staring at the screen, trying to think of other possibilities, then got creeped out when Totaka's Song started to play...

After probably a few more dead-ends I can't remember, I eventually got so angry that I threw one of the jars at the door. Which promptly opened.

On the one hand I should have tried this sooner, as there was nothing available except the door and the jars. On the other, I think this was the first example of opening a door with jars in the Zelda series and I don't recall any hints that it might do anything. Plus it's silly that a door can be opened with smashed pottery but not with explosives... Though I guess it was semi-shortly followed up by OoT's burnable-yet-uncuttable cobwebs (which for whatever reason never bothered me, but they're silly too).

Good times.

We know those things weren't in there already because the person who put them there basically said so. For instance, he said (emphasis mine):

If for whatever reason someone doubts this claim, it would be possible to look at the stream of controller inputs used to make the video and figure out how it encodes the "backdoor message" etc. This is all out in the open. Of course, if all we had was a Youtube video, it'd be harder to tell. Which is one of the reasons why it's good that someone is able to dig so deeply, to find out what's really there as opposed to the result of a few minutes/hours of video editing, and that the tools to do so are available to everyone. Even if only a few people will ever have the skill required to do so!

I'm not @jeff, but we don't have to speculate. Here, go look at the GameSpot review for OoT, open up a Javascript console (eg. ctrl-shift-i in non-Mac Firefox or Chrome will open the developer tools; from there select the console tab; Mac versions likely have different keyboard shortcuts; the F12 developer tools in IE offers something similar but I can't be bothered to confirm the exact steps right now), and paste in

document.querySelector("[itemprop=ratingValue]").innerHTML = "1.0";

Edit: <PSA>In general, you should avoid pasting arbitrary Javascript into a developer console if you don't understand it, as Bad Things could potentially happen. There's a reason Firefox no longer allows pasting Javascript into the URL bar by default any more, and instead makes you jump through the hoop of opening the developer tools. Be careful!</PSA>

There, I "changed" the review score. But, somewhat similar to ROM hacks or these newer total-control tool-assisted videos, it's easy to find out what the original was and therefore what the author's intent was. Sure, it's possible to trick someone who doesn't know better (eg. apply the "change", bring someone over and try to claim Jeff gave OoT 1.0), but also really easy to call bullshit (eg. reload the page, the "change" goes away). It'd be lousy if I tried to pass this off as the original author's intent, but I'm not, just like Lord Tom on TASVideos isn't trying to claim that the additions to SMB3 were in the original game. (As per the above quote, he did "pretend" it was in the original, but also admitted to doing so, so it's all in good fun.)

But maybe I misinterpret you, and instead of determining what the author's intention was, you're more concerned about preventing changes to the author's intent. In which case we're going to have to agree to disagree, because I'd rather be able to stand on the shoulders of giants (properly attributed, ideally!) than be forever locked into whatever someone happened to come up with years ago. (Not that fudging a review score is in any way standing on the shoulders of giants, so my analogy isn't perfect, but whatever!)

Edit: upon rereading this, perhaps the previous paragraph had too harsh a tone. Your opinion is of course valid!